More on the possibilities which open up with macromedia and Adobe’s merger: Acrobat and Flash may have achieved what Java could not. Although Adobe’s free reader and Macromedia’s free player must be tweaked for any given operating system, the material they display needs to be programmed only once. An Acrobat document or Flash animation should look essentially the same whether it’s read on a 17-inch computer monitor or a cellphone screen.
“We’re this close,” Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen says. “What we experience today [in cellphone service] will look like the dark ages a couple of years from now. For Adobe, this is all great news.”